IN MY last article, The cult that academic climate change research is trapped in – The Conservative Woman I argued that the ‘science’ of climate change is in effect a cult, and that my experience working in a climate research department at the University of Surrey checks many of the boxes of such organisations. I reasoned that, rather than objective truth and scientific credibility as the parameters of research and education, climate change can be fully understood as a social and cultural paradigm. I suggested that academic research funding is aimed not at serious academic inquiry but is about bolstering ideological narratives that flow directly from the UN and other globalist institutions such as the WEF and the World Bank. Pointing to the motivations behind this agenda, meteorologist Brian Sussman argues: ‘The climate doctrine holds that the environment has been despoiled by the products of luxury living. Guilt is repressed through acknowledgement of such allurement and the subsequent pursuit of a frugal existence and a reduced carbon footprint; these are all paths of self-righteousness and outward virtue.’ In other words, this is not science, but an ideological project.
Universities have long been a central plank in the left’s ‘long march through the institutions’. The avalanche of funding made available for climate change research over the last three decades has become so attractive that it is the obvious ‘go to’ for academics looking to bring in significant research income. Green is the new red. Pretty much any discipline can ride this gravy train if the words ‘climate change’, ‘sustainable lifestyles’ or ‘Anthropocene’ are included in the grant description box.
This trend has been made visible over the last few decades in the proliferation of ‘research centres’ or ‘centres of excellence’ on campuses. These ‘institutions within an institution’ now mean that education, research, publication profiles and funding strategies are much more aligned with ‘priority’ issues that have been decreed by governments and funding bodies – particularly the more dubious ‘philanthropic funding’ offered by individuals such as Bill Gates. Indeed, in the 1950s, the Rockefeller Foundation was directly involved in funding early research into climate change. According to Sweish researcher Jacob Nordangard, the more neutral science that was carried out at the time didn’t take long to metamorphose into ‘man-made climate change’ – the Rockefellers finding their avatar for overpopulation in university research.
As well as the University of Surrey’s Centre for Environment and Sustainability, amongst many others there are Cardiff University (Net Zero Innovation Institute), Exeter University (Environment and Sustainability Institute) and Oxford (Environmental Change Institute). These hubs either revolve exclusively around climate change or they specialise in related areas such as energy, food, water, or desired shifts in culture, politics and economics e.g. sustainable production/consumption. They have been made possible by the huge amounts of grant money made available to fund man-made climate change research and how it can ‘be reversed’. The highest-profile centres (mostly Russell Group universities) all boast ‘world-class research’, which involves extensive collaboration with stakeholders in business, government and with relevant civil society organisations. These high-profile centres also have strong global and regional links with other high-ranked universities, serving to reinforce the official UN narrative on climate science at a global level.
While at Surrey, I was one of the lead researchers on two such projects, both funded by the EU. The first, BARENERGY (Barriers for energy changes amongst end consumers and households), was a three-year collaborative project between the University of Surrey (UK); EDF Energy France; Central European University, Hungary; University of St Gallen, Switzerland; Norway Institute for Consumer Research and the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO). BARENERGY boasted a perfect alignment with the UN’s 17th Sustainable Development Goal: the formation and integration of public-private partnerships that would both broaden and ‘strengthen the means of implementation’ of all 17 goals across all sectors of society. Thus I found myself working alongside people in industry, from local government and from civil society groups (Green Alliance for example, where I attended some early meetings on how a carbon credit system might work), as well other academics from a variety of disciplines. These were some of the foundational steps towards what we now recognise as Economic and Social Governance (ESG). This step shift would now quietly begin to steer market-led business performance into a gradual descent towards ‘de-growth’, characterised by a more environmentally aware, more sustainable, and socially equitable model of capitalism. The big climate change grants are all about scale, and the big money involved is about encouraging the kind of multi-agency partnership working and collaboration which can embed and reinforce the right facts, the appropriate solutions, and the discrediting of any counter-narratives across different sectors of society and the economy.
It is not only the big money at stake; successful engagement with this agenda is the ‘gold standard’ for academic researchers. It almost guarantees career progression, and academics who are successful in securing these grants become more recognised, gain greater career stability, and their value to the university is increased through promotions, awards and professorships. Academics who secure big European bids can also ‘buy’ themselves out of their teaching commitments and employ themselves on the grant income. I worked with a few ‘leading lights’ in climate change research at both Surrey and the University of Exeter who, through their overall influence in this field, were rewarded by even greater levels of recognition than they enjoyed in their institutions, obtaining for example, positions in the UN, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Club of Rome. The Oxford Institute for Environmental Change (now the Environmental Change Institute) works closely with Oxford City Council, which is perhaps the leading political and educational 15-minute city hub.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn-SSR-2ndEd.pdf philosopher Thomas Kuhn explored the role of science as a social construction, where it depends not on objective truth, but when asufficient number of scientists agreeon the concepts, theories and actions which define the laws of the natural world; the appropriate theories and methods to be employed in scientific research, and the hypotheses and epistemological aims to be pursued. Kuhn did not specifically explore the role of funding in academic research, but it is not too much of a stretch to see how a scientific paradigm can be shaped and influenced to embody the perspective of ‘man-made climate change’ characterised by a particular set of beliefs, values and behaviours rather than by objective scientific truth. By funding the expansion of a specific research culture i.e. a high degree of interdisciplinarity, effective partnership working across different sectors of society, and globalised ‘world-class research’ networks, the HE sector has been hugely influential in mainstreaming man-made climate change as a cultural norm, and establishing it as objective truth.
